Jewish Hearts and Minds? Feelings of Belonging and Political Choices Among East German Intellectuals

On the chilly Sunday morning of 10 January 2010, I went for a stroll around the famous Weißensee cemetery in Berlin. I had wanted to see it for a long time and had read about its history as one of Europe’s largest and most beautiful Jewish burial grounds. Like most visitors, I was stunned by its grandeur, which tells so much about Jewish Berliners’ sense of pride and the optimism they felt about the future during the Imperial Period. And I was, like most visitors, struck by the depressing sense of absence after the early 1940s, signalling the monstrous rupture of civilization that had originated in this city.

Two graves in particular captured my attention. One was owned by the Kuczynski family. It clearly dated from the early twentieth century and indicated the wealth and self-confidence of those who had commissioned its architectural layout. The name Kuczynski immediately brought to mind Jürgen Kuczynski (JK) whose books I had read as a student, and whom I had met in 1978 when he gave a talk at Bielefeld University. JK had been a well-known economic historian in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), whom I remembered for his bourgeois attire (he was always dressed in a three-piece suit) and his claim to have reconciled seemingly irreconcilable identities: a Marxist believer, a loyal Communist Party (SED) member, and a free-thinking mind. I looked more closely, but could not find his name among the gravestones. There was Wilhelm Kuczynski, who had died in 1918, his wife Lucy née Brandeis, and some others, but no Jürgen. I decided to look him up as soon as I got home and see if there were any connections.